I have only just discovered this blog, and am still testing water.It is good,good,good to know that some of the old-guard new-wave warriors are still around and kicking.Yourself kicking harder than ever it seems.Moorcock and Delaney are still around, but producing stuff that for me at least is too intellectual and obscure.I can tell you that the Void Captains Tale is a book i,ve read over a dozen times since first discovering it in 2003.For some reason i don,t know why i,ve never read Child of Fortune, but intend to do so very soon.The only other Spinrad books i have, are Jack Barron,No Direction,and Raising Hell. I think i feel instinctively that much of your work might be too serious and heavy for a bubba like myself.It is the flamboyantly,prismatically explosive, operaticism of works like Void Captain that blow the mind ,that stimulate,arouse and energise.Such works fire one up , and in that sense they politicize.Cos works like that give you something to fight for and preserve the freedom and culture that produced such an indulgent and somewhat undisciplined masterwork.Let me conclude by saying that even i, realise i gotta grow up and tackle some of the less fantasy-based Spinrad work if i seriously want to explore the ouevre, which i do.As for undiscipline, creatively speaking, that never has and never will be a bad thing.
Mr. Spinrad - I just had an enormous flash of realization of how the media wars in both Little Creatures and A World Between are being realized with the dawning of creative technologies not dreamed of (except by folks like us) when you wrote them. CGI and Deep Fakes, and the perfect manipulation of images that is becoming possible, are having direct-input effects on our brains. I just watched the supposedly benign movie musical Spirited . . . The quality, and the psych-hospital level of emotional manipulation pulled off with amazing power and expertise, put me right on Pacifica. Thank you for being in my head - so many lesser writers have tried.
DONALD TRUMP AGENT OF SATAN The Bluegrass Song Just in time for the impeachment! Whoever turns out to be the Democratic candidate for President is welcome to use it as their theme song. Free of charge! Pro bono! DONALD TRUMP AGENT OF SATAN click here
For decades I tried to write a story from the viewpoints of dolphins or whales and failed. For decades people have tried to speak to dolphins in their own language and failed. This story, first published in Asimov's Magazine , is about why. Dolphins and whales don't have languages because they don't need them. They've got something much better. THE MUSIC OF THE SPHERE by Norman Spinrad In the 1960s there was a band called Blue Cheer whose claim to be the loudest rock and roll band on the planet went unchallenged. They would play in intimate club venues standing right in front of the same monster speakers used in stadiums. They were so loud that many aficionados of their recorded music fled in physically agony fro...
THE TRANSFORMATION CRISIS by Norman Spinrad a book proposal This orginated as a proposal for a book which was way ahead of it’s time and never got written. It became a free-standing essay in several languages, and several speeches, and then the ...
Here's the latest freebie story, I think this is going to be an ongoing series, every time I look into my short story backlist I find more things like this. PRIME TIME was published in Omni a long time ago, long before there was any such thing as virtual reality, but it's still predictive. There's never yet been a virtual reality as total as this. PRIME TIME by Norman Spinrad Edna chose to awake this morning to good old breakfast loop A. John was reading a newspaper over pancakes and sausages in the kitchen of their old home. The kids were gulping the last of their food and were anxious to be on their way to school. After yesterday's real-time-shared breakfast with John, she really felt she needed the soothing old familiar tape fro...
QUARANTINE by Norman Spinrad If it wasn’t the best of times, at least it wasn’t the worst of times, or something like that, which is the opening line of a novel called A TALE OF TWO CITIES, and it seemed like this would be only a tale of one. Back in the day before the Quarantine, Manhattan island was the heart and soul and pocketbook of New York City, to the extent that New York could have been said to have all three, Wall Street, Greenwich Village, Broadway and 42nd Street, and all that jazz. When you saw a movie or a TV show or an ad featuring New York, the Big Apple was Manhattan, not anything in what some visiting Californian must have dubbed the “Outer Boroughs,” the moral equivalent of Anaheim or Eagle Rock as far as a Hollywood wise guy was ...
ELECT YOUR PEOPLE'S POLICE by Norman Spinrad If something isn't done, and done fast, a civil war in the United States is just a shot or a Molotov Cocktail away. But how and by who? If there is one American who could stand up before the protesters and be listened to it is surely the one and only former President of the United States, Barack Obama. Live before the largest crowd possible and of course well televised. What should he say? He should speak the hard truth to the leaderless protesters that what they are doing is counterproductive to their own confusion of diverse and general causes which if even possible would take decades of legislation to accomplish. What is needed immediately is a strong significant and reachable demand. Demand that the head of all police departments in the United States--cities, towns, st...
GAY OR STRAIGHT, MARRIED OR NOT, ALL COUPLES ARE MATES! by Norman Spinrad A while back, Dona Sadock--my clumsily so-called “significant other”--and I attended a traditional wedding where the “bride and groom,” a man and a woman costumed more or less like the traditional little statues on the traditional wedding cake, became “husband” and “wife.” Dona and I had been “significant others” decades ago, parted for decades and married other people, which is to say officially became “wives and husbands,” were both divorced from our respective spouses, and have now once more been eachother’s “significant others,” for over a decade. Awkwardly written paragraph, now isn’t it? What do you call a man and a woman who are and have long been living together as “husband” ...
DIRECT ACTION Virginia with 13 electoral votes has now joined the Compact. The magic number is 270. Now the count to it is 209 and rising. Only 61 more electoral votes to go. Which state will be next? Which state will be the one to finally make it so? Save American Constitutional Democracy from the coming singularity via The National Popular Vote Interstate Compact In 2016 Clinton got 3 million more popular votes than Trump but Trump was elected President against the will of the majority of the American voters and the odds are that something like it is going to happen again in 2020. And if it does, the Constitution of the United States will be revealed as incompatible with American Democracy and something cannot help but give. There cannot fail to be a paradigm shift AKA a revolution against the Constitution as it stands. Indeed there has already been a...
THE ABNORMAL NEW NORMAL by Norman Spinrad (a presidential platform for a non-existent campaign) “Things are more like they are now than they ever have been before.” --Dwight Eisenhower “They wrote the biggest rubber check in history and passed it off on themselv...
I have only just discovered this blog, and am still testing water.It is good,good,good to know that some of the old-guard new-wave warriors are still around and kicking.Yourself kicking harder than ever it seems.Moorcock and Delaney are still around, but producing stuff that for me at least is too intellectual and obscure.I can tell you that the Void Captains Tale is a book i,ve read over a dozen times since first discovering it in 2003.For some reason i don,t know why i,ve never read Child of Fortune, but intend to do so very soon.The only other Spinrad books i have, are Jack Barron,No Direction,and Raising Hell. I think i feel instinctively that much of your work might be too serious and heavy for a bubba like myself.It is the flamboyantly,prismatically explosive, operaticism of works like Void Captain that blow the mind ,that stimulate,arouse and energise.Such works fire one up , and in that sense they politicize.Cos works like that give you something to fight for and preserve the freedom and culture that produced such an indulgent and somewhat undisciplined masterwork.Let me conclude by saying that even i, realise i gotta grow up and tackle some of the less fantasy-based Spinrad work if i seriously want to explore the ouevre, which i do.As for undiscipline, creatively speaking, that never has and never will be a bad thing.
ReplyDeleteMr. Spinrad - I just had an enormous flash of realization of how the media wars in both Little Creatures and A World Between are being realized with the dawning of creative technologies not dreamed of (except by folks like us) when you wrote them. CGI and Deep Fakes, and the perfect manipulation of images that is becoming possible, are having direct-input effects on our brains. I just watched the supposedly benign movie musical Spirited . . . The quality, and the psych-hospital level of emotional manipulation pulled off with amazing power and expertise, put me right on Pacifica. Thank you for being in my head - so many lesser writers have tried.
ReplyDeleteThanks foor sharing
ReplyDelete